Bright Air - Barry Maitland [107]
Anna drew me aside as we stood watching them. ‘What are we going to say, Josh?’
We were discussing this in whispers when the first cops arrived, two uniformed men who took us out to the front room. One sat with us, taking down names and addresses, while the other spoke to the ambos. Then plainclothes police came in, and eventually Detective Sergeant Maddox.
I wondered afterwards what he must have made of the scene when he first walked in. Apart from the bodies and the smashed French windows and the deranged-looking witnesses, the whole place had an air of chaos, as if some shocking event, an earthquake perhaps, had given it a violent shake. Perhaps he was used to it, for he moved about very calmly, directing the others, then took me aside from Anna, cautioned me, and asked me what had happened. He fixed me with that evangelical eye and told me that he wanted the truth.
Well, yes. We all say we want that. Anna and I had spent the past weeks searching for it, but now we’d found it I wasn’t sure it was something we could entirely share. I imagined myself standing up in the Coroner’s Court and explaining that the distinguished ecologist Marcus Fenn, who had once climbed a mountain with the great Arne Naess, had decided that, in order to save the planet, one of his students had to be killed. And had then persuaded his other students to carry it out. I imagined the other people in that courtroom—Damien’s wife Lauren, Owen’s wife Suzi, Curtis’s parents—listening to me explain how their sadly missed husband or son was in fact a murderer. I imagined the families that would be fractured by those words. Bob Kelso would be in trouble, and the others would have to re-evaluate their whole lives. Assuming they believed us.
So I told him the simplified version of the truth that Anna and I had hurriedly decided on. We had returned from Lord Howe Island without finding any definite new facts, but were still troubled by the official account. When we visited Marcus that evening to discuss it with him again, we found him working in his laboratory. He seemed overwrought, and probably drunk. He became highly emotional as we talked about the deaths of Luce, and Curtis and Owen, and he said that he was responsible for them. At one point he became so agitated that I had to physically restrain him. Much of what he said was confusing, but he seemed to imply that Damien knew the truth about Luce’s death. We decided to leave and talk to Damien about this. On the way we became worried that Marcus might harm himself, and Anna decided to return to keep an eye on things. However, in the meantime Marcus had apparently phoned Damien, who had set off for Castlecrag before I arrived at his apartment in The Rocks. By the time Anna got back to Marcus’s house, Damien was there, and Marcus appeared unconscious. Damien became very emotional, physically attacking Anna and driving her out of the house as I arrived. He bolted the door, and when we eventually went around to the back of the house, we saw him inject himself, and tried to stop him.
No eggs, no phasmids, no Balls Pyramid.
Maddox asked me to enlarge on certain parts of this account, then went away and took Anna through the same process. There was a spell where he left us in order to direct a photographer and others securing the scene, and then we were taken to the police station at Chatswood. There we were examined by a doctor and a forensic officer, and our clothes were removed. Dressed in overalls, we were separately given cups of tea and biscuits, then formally interviewed on film by Maddox and another detective.
From time to time I caught glimpses of Anna, through the glass panel in a door, and passing under escort in a corridor, unreal in those white overalls beneath dazzling fluorescent light. We seemed like characters in some TV drama in which we were having to improvise